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Growing Up

A Journey Toward Theoretical Understanding

University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

This article describes a struggle and a journey. It shows a struggle between the need to be scholarly and the desire to be evocative; it travels carefully along a path toward less certainty. The article discusses how the author, as a doctoral student, was aware of the need to address her innate resistance to use theory and how she struggled to assimilate this into her research project and text. The author says the journey toward this understanding was akin to a growth spurt—sometimes painful and always surprising. Here, the author uses a narrative style to explore approaches to theory, knowledge, and representation and to show this struggle in the context of her research into lived experience. The author records the way how she constructed her own theoretical framework and show the dawning realization that decisions about approach and method are indeed theoretically informed and supported. Finally, the article discusses how the author faced her theories about theories and discovered that the journey is important and that certainty is an elusive destination.

Key Words: theory • autoethnography • storytelling

This version was published on October 1, 2009

Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 8, 1338-1351 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1077800409339581


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